My Take on Black Jesus
What did Jesus really look like?
After reading Jonathan Poletti’s “Looking for Black Jesus”, I felt a need to give my viewpoint. This is a subject with which I have a great deal of knowledge. I don’t actually study black Jesus but I do study black history and Jesus. It is my opinion that history, art, and religion have all been whitewashed. By that I mean washed to look white. White people, who are still the decision makers, have always decided that everything should be white, even God. “Well, we would have to rewrite the history books.” Why not? You make new versions every year and charge hundreds of dollars for them. Shouldn’t you make a little effort to rectify past mistakes?
In Christianity, as with everything else, paintings, Bible pictures, sculptures of Jesus, and movies about Jesus have all had a European slant but Jesus wasn’t a European. He was a Jew living in Israel in ancient times. He didn’t have blue eyes with light skin and hair. I’m sorry but that is not realistic. When Jonathan said “When the Pontifical Academy for Life, a Catholic honorary society, Tweeted this Photoshopped image in 2020, their followers weren’t amused.” “This is blasphemy,” replied one.”, I wasn’t surprised. The KKK burned crosses for many years. To this day, I don’t know what that means. Were they trying to say that Christians are hateful racists? This is how religion sometimes goes.
In reality, Jesus loved everyone no matter who they were. He didn’t care if they were foreigners. Neither did the Jews. Hate doesn’t come from God but it does come from some people, mostly white people. This goes along with all of the other types of hate from these people who often call themselves Christians. They aren’t. They give Christianity a bad name.
So, let me explain that the Jews had good relationships with black people. In fact, Moses married a Cushite woman named Zipporah. He named one of his sons Cush as in the Kingdom of Cush. Archaeologists conjecture over where Cush was. Come on. It wasn’t in Arabia and it wasn’t in Ethiopia. It was the Cushite Kingdom in modern day Sudan which is being excavated by an archaeologist, finally. At the turn of the last century, a racist white European archaeologist found the Kingdom of Cush. He didn’t like black people being pharaohs. So, he buried his findings. In the last decade, another archaeologist, also from Europe, found his hidden papers and went back to Cush to uncover the Kingdom of Cush. The Kingdom of Cush was overtaken by the Egyptians at one time but later the Kingdom of Cush overtook Egypt. You will be hard pressed to find this information anywhere but I will tell you that it was the 26th dynasty. In the past, I loved archaeology until it became Egyptology. I am so tired of Egyptology. How many times can you rehash the same old pyramids? Well, every once in a while, they do find something new but only one guy and his team are exploring Cush which is in Sudan just south of Egypt. They had pyramids too.
I often watch YouTube videos or go to websites where black people speak about how their history was ignored. The history books may cover a few black people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, and a few others but they overlook many more. Maybe all of this is a tangent but it is related to black people not being given their just due. It isn’t just people of African descents who don’t make the cut for the history books. People from anywhere in the world except Europe are mostly excluded. India and China invented many things that ancient Europeans have been credited for. We all know that Columbus wasn’t the first person to reach the Americas. It was the Vikings. Well, no, actually, the Chinese sailed to the west coast of the United States centuries before Europeans. Then, it has recently been found that the First Citizens did not simply cross the land bridge during the ice age. They came to America before the land bridge existed. And if you really want to go back in time, even before the First Citizens, there were other people already here. I wonder if they might be the Anasazi which little is known about. There is a BBC documentary on YouTube entitled “First Americans were Black Aborigines”. BBC is as good as National Geographic or Smithsonian. This documentary shows that the skeletons that archaeologists found in Brazil were from people who were East African, South Asian, Melanesian, or Australian Aborigine from 50,000 years ago. This should have been huge news but we all know that Egypt is more important. How dare we have an interest in South American archaeology or Asian countries, or India, or ….? Only Egypt matters at least to American archaeologists.
I know that you have heard of the Queen of Sheba. She was from Cush. Cush was rather an important place in the Bible. Cush or the Cushites are mentioned 55 times in the Bible. The Queen of Sheba is mentioned eight times alone.
The person who posted this image stated that this picture was “how the Queen of Sheba may have looked”. Really?! No, she didn’t look that way. She looked Sudanese.
This is how she looked.
Has everyone heard of the slave Bible. During the time when white southerners owned people, they chopped up the Bible so that it contained all of the passages that told slaves to do as their masters told them. Of course, you know that they took out the parts that mentioned fleeing slave masters and the like. I’m guessing that Moses wasn’t in that Bible.
To me, some white people are still trying to enslave other people in many ways. They want to keep all of the money and power in their own hands. Love of money is why we have global warming — really. I will explain that in another story.
My sister once said to me that six old white men are running the world. I, personally, think that it is more than six but that is just how I see it. I don’t hate all white people. I’m predominantly white with enough other to care about other. I realize that there are still a great number of white people who think that they are above everybody else on the face of the planet. This isn’t just people of color. This is women, LGTBQ+, poor people, immigrants, anyone who isn’t them. These people disturb and disgust me greatly.
I once had one of God’s people explain to me that God sees people like t-shirts. They come in different colors. No color is good or bad — they are just different colors. And I notice that even racist white people don’t mind having a black dog or brown dog or a yellow dog or any color dog.
Racist white people are why Gabrielle Union left AGT. She was told that her hair was “too black” for the show. Are you kidding?! One of the sweetest, beautiful women wasn’t good enough for AGT unless she relaxed her hair or ironed it straight. I’ll bet the people who said that never watched Chris Rock’s “Good Hair”. I would be jealous of her if she wasn’t such a sweetheart. My hair won’t even hold a perm. My younger daughter ironed her beautiful tight curled hair because she had a hard time getting a hairbrush through it. I was heartbroken. What I wouldn’t give for beautiful curly hair.
So, what did Jesus really look like? Several years ago, scientists made a bust of what Jesus would really have looked like. He was a dark Jew in the times before the Europeans Jews had come to Israel. I believe that God put Jesus where Europe, Africa, and Asia met since Jesus was and is for all people. Of course, I think that India would have been better choice since people range from very dark to very light in India but who am I to argue with God?
This is what Jesus really looked like.
